Kindle e-readers finally (kind of) support ePub books

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Enlarge / Kindles still won't directly open ePub files, but there's one less hoop to jump through now. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Amazon's Kindles are some of the best dedicated e-readers you can buy, but a longstanding criticism from users of DRM-free books from non-Amazon sources is that they don't support the open ePub standard. That has changed at some point in the recent past, as spotted by Good E-Reader: Amazon's Kindle Personal Documents Service will now accept ePub files sent to your device's Send to Kindle email address, the same way it currently handles PDF files, Word documents, and other image and text files.

Kindles still don't natively support sideloading ePub files—the Send to Kindle service converts the documents to AZW3 files, something users could already do themselves using a variety of free tools. But official support from Amazon removes a step from the process and will help users avoid shady ad-riddled third-party conversion sites. We've tested it with an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite running the latest version of the Kindle software, and the conversion process seemed to go off without a hitch.

If using the Send to Kindle email address is still too onerous, Amazon's support document says it will add the same ePub conversion support to its Send to Kindle apps at some point in late 2022. Amazon also says that it will discontinue Send to Kindle support for MOBI files in late 2022, since those files "won't support the newest Kindle features for documents." MOBI files already on your device will remain there and will continue to work as they currently do.

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